A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Guide Me Back Home 3LP by City and Colour. I must confess that most regularly, live albums don’t thrill me. City and Colour albums do not often thrill me either, for that matter (long story short, while I was a big fan of Alexisonfire back in the day, I found the first two City and Colour albums staggeringly overwrought); I don’t know that I’d call my distaste for the band absolute...
Talib KweliRadio Silence In a way, Talib Kweli will never get his due, and that’s just fine. By that, I mean that he should be ten times more popular than he is right now. He’s got everything you’d want in good music: talent, execution, wit, intellect, and a message. But unfortunately, that’s not synonymous with mainstream rap. Nope. Mainstream rap is all about image, excess, money, and fame. Like MF Doom said, the reason he wears a mask is to...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into EP by Dad Brains. Now over forty years since it first appeared, it was inevitable that punk rock was probably going to take on something that resembled a fatherly voice, somehow. How could it not? With Green Day having made concept records already and both Fat Mike Burkett and Mike Watt having produced punk rock opera albums, punk and its pillars have already begun taking on “grown up projects” (or at least...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Spencer Sings The Hits LP by Jon Spencer. That the fidelity, equalization and overall sound found on a vinyl recording is unmatched by any other musical mediumto date is a claim which has been proven several times over in many place by a great many people (including by several in this column, several times over too), and one of the great examples can be found on a vinyl copy of Spencer...
Dog Party Hit & Run Listening to Dog Party brought back some sweet memories from my college days. Days when I first starting getting into the Ramones. I had been exposed to punk rock in high school and it made a lasting impression but it was only in college that I started doing my homework and learning the basics. NOFX only takes you so far, after all. So, listening to the Ramones consisted of a pattern that’s all too familiar...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into Light // Sound’s self-titled debut album. Since childhood, we’re taught to never judge a book by its cover or be so superficial as to make inferences about a person’s character based solely upon their exterior persona. It’s good advice – making snap judgements about the contents of an article or individual by the first sight one sees – but that doesn’t mean the first thing that potential patrons visually absorb cannot be...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the One Family, One Flag 3LP compilation from Pirates Press Records. Now twelve years after the last installment came out, the whole world seems to have changed a couple of times but punk fans have started looking back and feeling some nostalgia for the great punk compilation series Punk-O-Rama is pretty understandable. Punk-O-Rama was once an impressive beast, the release of which used to be hotly anticipated every year; once, Punk-O-Rama young...
Rage Against the Machine The Entire Catalog vinyl reissue Let me start off this review by painting a picture of just how important Rage Against the Machine were to my development as a teenager. Growing up in Aruba in the 90s, completely isolated from the world, we craved outside culture. We didn’t have a good idea of what was going on in the cool parts of the world (like the USA), so we’d rely on word of mouth from kids...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Night Guy at The Apocalypse, Profiles of a Rushing Midnight LP by Hamell On Trial. In the spirit of full disclosure, yes -I am a fan of Hamell On Trial. I was totally won over by Ed Hamell when the singer’s eighth album, Tough Love, came out in 2003 and have excitedly checked and weighed) in and given consistently positive coverage to each album that has come along since then. I...
A deeper look at the grooves pressed into the Porterhouse vinyl reissue of the Saturation LP by Urge Overkill. Quick history lesson: By 1992, Urge Overkill had already established itself both in the fairly unforgiving Chicago music scene and on the North American college radio circuit with the help of albums like Americruiser and The Supersonic Storybook. Not only that, the band had cut a fairly striking and peerless image; unlike so many other alt-rock groups who preferred to mix,...